[issue31654] ctypes should support atomic operations

[Antoine Pitrou]

Antoine Pitrou <pitrou at free.fr> added the comment:

Le 01/10/2017 à 21:51, Daniel Colascione a écrit :
> 
>> That does sound specialized to me :-) Can you give an example of such a
>> C API?
> 
> The Linux futex protocol, as described in man futex(7), comes to mind.
> Maybe you want to manipulate C++ shared_ptr objects --- these objects also
> rely on atomic operations.

That's even more specialized than I expected...

> It's still faster than waiting several milliseconds for the GIL.

Are you talking about https://bugs.python.org/issue31653? If so, it's
just waiting for an appropriate PR to be filed.

> I don't understand the opposition to this feature request. It's a trivial
> amount of code (invoke a compiler intrinsic), makes the API more complete,
> and addresses a real, specific use case as well as some other hypothetical
> use cases.

That's a compiler-dependent compiler intrinsic (or perhaps a whole range
of them, given there are different widths to cater for), an API wrapping
it, plus some documentation and tests, that we have to maintain until
the end of time (at least nominally).

> The standard library already includes a whole web server and HTTP
> client, a diff engine, various database engines, a facility for parsing
> email, an NNTP client, a GUI system, and a facility for "determin[ing] the
> type of sound [a] file".

It was determined at the time that the use cases for these justified the
effort of maintaining them in the stdlib. For a couple of these (such as
"determining the type of a sound file" or even an NNTP client), I expect
the decision would be different nowadays :-)

Perhaps other core developers will disagree with me and agree to include
(i.e. review, maintain) this functionality.  I simply am not convinced
it deserves being included, but that's not a veto.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue31654>
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